The 'Living Dead' Among Us
The globe is filled with strange and unknowable things. Ghosts and goblins,the walking dead...choose there's lots of it around to understand more about. George A. Romero's film, The Night of the Living Dead, tells the story of a set of siblings, Johnny and Barbra, who drive to rural Pennsylvania to visit the grave of their father. There they are encountered by a zombie and they retreat to a farmhouse where they attempt to ward off the living dead who are hungry for their flesh. There fear intensifies when they hear on the radio that the living dead are spreading murder and terror throughout the eastern U.S. Zombies are the fictional 'unliving' among us. They are empty shells who move about and react as if they did have souls, but they don't. Romero may have constructed his concept of soulless creatures from the superstitious religions of Haiti. But the concept can be traced all the way back to one of the earliest literary works known to man, the Epic of Gilgamesh of...